Growing Your Company's Sales The Skills Needed To Generate Leads

By J. P. Bolduc



To grow company sales, your marketing program should include professional lead generation experts who excel at getting to the right people in a prospect's company, and generating solid interest about your company's product and services. They should have an excellent understanding about generating leads from a product and service perspective so they can engage a prospect in a conversation focused on the customer's real life business pain. The conversation should result in capturing the essence and specifics of what the prospect is looking for and creating enthusiasm for what the company offers.

The resulting highly qualified leads with the "right stuff" (C level contact name with decision-making authority, budget information, specific needs) will provide information for your sales people to follow up and will result in far greater sales than any traditional marketing method can produce.

In general, you can incorporate expert lead generation skills into your marketing department and program four ways:

1. Using in-house experts

2. Using your sales force

3. Hiring telemarketers

4. Outsourcing to a professional lead generation company

Each one, however, has drawbacks.

If proactive calling is the way to stop "win-able" sales from falling through the cracks and help you grow your sales, why not simply make these calls in-house? While many companies do, it requires skill and business expertise. The question is, "Are you in the lead generation business or the business of providing products and services?"

When companies attempt to perform high-end lead generation in-house, they tend to utilize lower paid, junior individuals in the marketing department who lack the experience, confidence and business savvy required to talk to senior level decision-makers. The few companies that do hire very seasoned callers unfortunately end up with high turnover.

Why? Burnout. Can you imagine seasoned executives making the same type of call hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month? They quickly burn out and/or get bored, or both. Companies using seasoned callers usually have a revolving door of people, the expense of constant hiring and re-training and little by way of positive results.

On the other hand, why not simply use your salespeople to make these high level calls? There's a very substantial difference between the functions of sales and marketing. Although you may have tremendously gifted sales people, they may or may not be very good marketers. For example, they may not have investigative interviewing skills to produce the intelligence you're looking for. They may lack the business comfort level needed to make "cold calls" to the high level executives. They may not have the temperament to be constantly put on hold or to find the right person to talk to in your prospects' organizations. Further, using your sales force to place cold calls is counterproductive. Sales people who spend their time cold calling to develop useable leads are not closing deals, and therefore are not doing what you hired and trained them to do.

Should you engage the services of a telemarketing company? The average telemarketer earns a base salary of $22,000 to $25,000 per year. With overtime and bonuses, one can make $30,000 per year, maybe. It is unlikely that someone making $11 to $15 per hour, reading a script, will be able to hold his or her own representing your product/service solution with senior executives at the "C" level who earn six and seven figures.

A fourth alternative is to outsource this high-end lead generation activity on an as-needed basis. Some of the benefits to this alternative include avoiding the cost of hiring full-time business experts and supervisors, and paying for equipment and benefits. Professional lead generation companies can provide business development managers (BDMs) who have a variety of calling and project management responsibilities and assignments. BDMs are constantly calling different industries, representing different kinds of companies and dealing with different titles and challenges. In short, these individuals get the variety they need to keep mentally challenged, and are typically paid at much higher rates (compared to telemarketers) for their business knowledge, skills and experience. The high quality, useable leads produced, however, more than cover the cost of a BDM's service when your sales force starts closing sales from the leads.



J. P. Bolduc is founder and CEO of JPB Enterprises, Inc. (JPBE), an investment banking, private equity and real estate development holding company, which includes Grace Marketing Inc. He can be reached at 410-884-1960.